Better never to have read it at all

[wobulous]

unde rogo te, o lector, ne nimium laeteris si multa legeris, sed si multa intellexeris nec tantum intellexeris sed retinere potueris.

The above, from Hugh of St. Victor, is a really good motto for the kind of learning I think we all aspire to. “Don’t be too happy if you read a whole bunch…but rather, if you understand…but uh, well, not so much if you have understood, but really…if you’ve memorized the damn thing.”

–Hugh of St Victor, paraphrased

Because I’m converting to Judaism, I’m working on learning Hebrew as my primary mnemonic task, but I’ve also recently added a history memory palace (at least from 1000 BCE to 0), and I aspire to be the sort of person who just has a gigantic memory palace full of all the things he has ever studied.

In the past I have not been convinced of the utility of using memory palaces for language learning, but for Hebrew, which is so different from English, I got frustrated at other exposure-oriented approaches to learning that left me feeling like I really didn’t confidently know anything. I’ve had a lot of success with those massive-exposure styles of language learning for stuff with Latinate alphabets and many cognates, but Hebrew is just a whole other beast.

Right now I’ve got probably a 1000-word passive vocabulary and I’ve been adding a locus to a memory palace for every new word I encounter and scheduling reviews of that locus in Anki. So far so good. Probably 200 words added this way, and I feel 100% confident in them – zero fuzziness.

I think of the gold standard for language acquisition as being ten new words a day. I’d like to do twenty because I am a cocky sort of bastard. But this seems to require some more automation that I’ve been able to muster, since I’m old and have a busy professional and familial life. A week ago I put together a big list of a hundred words and a pre-built walk through my town, and that’s made it easy to do twenty new words a day, but…I don’t want to stop for many days, do a bunch of prep, and then start again at 20/day.

The slowest parts are 1) finding the words to add and 2) looking them up. I think this is automatable – I should probably just scan some Hebrew text every day, copy and paste the first 20 confusing words I see into an LLM, and have it spit out a csv file I can edit with locations and stick into anki.

So far this week the words have been from Genesis, but I’d like to learn modern Hebrew too, so I think the next hundred should be from Israeli newspapers or blogs or something.

I’ve also been grinding verb tables in Hebrew for a while since Hebrew verbs are hell. Way harder than Latin. It turns out I don’t have time to copy out tables for an hour a day, so I’ve also just been identifying pain points and encoding those into anki rather than doing the copying. It’s less wholesome but more efficient.

[Hari-P (Hari)]

I don’t know if it’s the kind of Hebrew you are looking for (as in I’m not sure if you’re learning ancient/modern Hebrew and how advanced you are), but I really like the Aleph with Beth channel (on YouTube). I was sceptical of the comprehensible input at first but I feel like I’ve progressed much quicker with their method than with other more “school-like” ones.

On their website there are accompanying grammar lessons and even Anki decks for the first 40 lessons, so no need to watch again the videos to review - Which is my problem, I love learning with the videos, speaking aloud really helps learning faster, but I find it too time consuming and inefficient for review (since after all there is no point looking at a 15 min. video when I perhaps have forgotten two words from it).

Here is the ressources section of their website, maybe some things will be useful: Resources - Free Hebrew. Forever.

[wobulous]

Aleph with Beth is great, thanks! I was aware of the channel but skipped it over assuming it was the usual garbage, but she definitely seems to know what she’s doing language-acquisition-wise.

I feel like I’ve been studying Hebrew forever (both modern and biblical), but I’m still very much at a beginner level. I’ve done a single pass through the whole First Hebrew Primer, doing all the readings and memorizing all the vocab and at least being able to recognize verb forms. I’ve since been floundering a little bit until about a month ago when I started on this project of just dumping Hebrew vocab into my brain with a memory palace tied into Anki.

I’m doing very little in the way of comprehensible input at this point, but I’ve noticed my understanding of Israeli pop music significantly improving just from the memory palace work, which is nice.

[Josh (Josh Cohen)]

I’m not sure if it’s what you’re looking for, but I have this workbook (for this textbook). I haven’t spent much time with them yet, but the workbook looks pretty good. It uses passages from the Tanakh and has vocabulary lists and translations of words that might be unfamiliar.

Here’s an example:

For listening, the entire Tanakh is available here and here. Intermediate listening practice here and here. There’s also a “Tanakh Read Along” app where you can read the text and listen at the same time: iOS, Android.

Sefaria (Joshua Foer’s site) is also good, because you can double-click on any word and see the translation.

[wobulous]

These look great, thanks. Surprising number of people with an interest in Hebrew on this forum!

I’m definitely already a big Sefaria fan (though I had no idea Foer was behind it! wtf!). I’ve been noodling over making use of either their friendly web API or just running a local copy of the site, which they support: I’ve got some vague notions about programming something that lets me mark unfamiliar words and autogenerates the skeleton of anki cards from them.

[wobulous]

Experimented this past week with using song lyrics as memorial cues and of course it works really well. One thing was that surprised me is how well the associations work even if they’re completely strained. As an example, I memorized the list of praedicamenta from Aristotle’s Categories using Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues”.

“it’s rollin’ round the bend” = “quantity”, because I visualized more than one bend, but there’s just one bend; multiple bends doesn’t make any physical sense. Doesn’t matter.

I also did the common topics of invention with Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Some of the lines I just transformed into little stories, which is just ordinary mnemonic advice, but again, it felt surprisingly painless compared to usual methods.

The reviews are also trivially easy since I have so many positive associations with the songs.

Anyway, highly recommend experimenting with this if you haven’t tried it. I’ve got probably a hundred songs or more memorized verbatim or nearly so, and that’s a lot of freebie loci. I might need a master song that contains links to all the songs I know. Luckily Leonard Cohen has a song called “Master Song”, lol.

[wobulous]

Forgot to mention I’ve been really enjoying making use of a history memory palace (50 years per locus) as I’ve been reading a medieval history textbook for the past month. It’s pretty shocking how mixed up my intuitive grasp of history timelines were until I started plunking down historical personages in the right places. For example, St Benedict lived wayyyyyyy earlier than I would have guessed if randomly asked. St Patrick, too.

I also vibe-coded myself a basic LingQ replacement that functions really well for Hebrew, with built-in LLM-powered tooling for definitions from context, auto-simplifying text, and giving grammatical breakdowns of sentences. I’ve switched over to using it as my primary learning tool for Hebrew since it incorporates an SRS as well.

Most of my readings have been really stupid LLM-generated stories, but today I started using an LLM to simplify the Hebrew version of “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid”, which I read in English years ago. That was fun.

I started tracking a raw count of “words read”, which I’ve found really motivating for getting enough comprehensible input flowing through my brain:

Also I’m officially Jewish now. Mazal tov to me!

[meepster (Meepster the Unstupid)]

Mazel Tov and welcome to the tribe! (I’m Jewish too)

[wobulous]

It’s been a little while!

I have new (to me) memory things I’ve been playing with and have found useful that I mostly stole from Lynne Kelly: using Tarot cards for memory palaces, and using my body as a memory palace.

For the body thing, I was staying up all night studying in celebration of Shavuot, and a traditional thing to read is the giving of the Torah at Sinai, and I decided to stick the ten commandments on my fingers at some point in the middle of the night along with some traditional commentary on them encoded alongside them. I decided it was so delightful that I would use my whole body as a Jewish memory palace – mostly as links to other palaces, but some stuff directly encoded. So far I’ve got the Hebrew calendar, some key halachic ideas, and Rambam’s principles of faith. I then diverted to memorizing all the names of all the Torah portions in order, which I’m doing with…

…Tarot cards! I picked some representative ones (e.g, “The Lovers”) for Bereshit and just straightforwardly assigned images to each torah portion in an ordered path around the card. I love love love that it means I end up with a magical mnemonic artifact at the end of the process that becomes more precious than a mere card.

I also have the idea that I could get other sets of Tarot cards with different images and use the same card (e.g, “The Lovers”) to represent other aspects of the readings: e.g, different commentarial traditions on the same chapters, or maybe Midrashim tied to the same portions.

Lastly, I’ve taken a strong interest in studying physical geography as a way to make studying Jewish history feel more, uh, grounded. My current technique is to learn major geographical divisions, and then to test myself by drawing a whole region roughly from memory with labels. My goal, especially with the Levant, is to be able to drill down into these regions and recursively do the same process (e.g, to be able to drill down into like “the Galilee” and further subdivide from memory into upper, lower, key rivers, key valleys, etc – always being able to completely subdivide the larger spaces).

Continuing to study Hebrew; it’s going well. Feel like I took a turn in the past few weeks and now I can sort-of understand or at least be entertained by some intermediate modern Hebrew materials like the “Hebrew Time” podcast. Feels super encouraging after what feels like an eternal beginner phase.

[noblethings]

I like your “paraphrased” quote froom Hugo St Victor and congrats on your conversion. I am casually learning to read Hebrew by using a “fill-in-the-blanks” method, it’s surprisingly effective.

You are learning Hebrew verb conjugations in tables? If you’re learning conjugations, did you try learning them on the Menorah, because I think that’s how they usually do it. If I remember correctly, the verb root goes through varying degrees of intensity and also the number of people involved?

I could be wrong though… Like I said, I’m a very casual learner right now, and focusing on reading only. I personally don’t like to learn conjugations in tables, I did it in school and it didn’t make me a good speaker or reader. Anyway just a suggestion in case you haven’t tried that yet.

[wobulous]

You are learning Hebrew verb conjugations in tables?

Well…not anymore.

My current method is mostly to just focus on modern Hebrew with a combination of SRS for individual words, extensive reading practice, and, uh, lots of Israeli pop music. Also lots of contemporary American Jewish music and traditional music as well. But mostly ■■■■■■ pop music!

I’ve done a few passes through my Biblical Hebrew textbook, so I’d like to think I have a “feel” for the different binyanim without worrying about it too much. I do dimly remember a menorah visual for the binanaim! That sounds like the sort of thing I should be into.

What’s the fill-in-the-blanks method? Like cloze deletions?

[noblethings]

Did something get censored in your reply? I see a bunch of squares.

The “fill-in-the-blanks” method I’m using is nothing official, it’s something I do in about 3 phases. So for example, I’m reading the book of Genesis. My aim is to read aloud and to be understood by whoever is listening.

For the first phase I select several verses in English and I replace some of the words with their equivalents in Hebrew script. I learn to read that and pronounce the words properly from memory. I listen to a native speaker reading it and try to imitate that pronunciation.

Then for the 2nd phase, I just replace even more words with the Hebrew script and I learn to read that. By the 3rd phase I’m reading sentences that are 90-100% Hebrew. I can usually read the whole thing by then and I move onto another set of verses.

[Hari-P (Hari)]

Don’t know if I already posted this, but for people looking for material I find the book of Jonah one of the easiest to read.

Here to read (and listen) in comic form: Jonah Comic - Page 1 | animatedhebrew.com